At the end of the night, I sat on the stairs and watched Skylar leave, like the inconsequential ones before him.
Chapter Two:
The Secret to My Excess
I was running so unbelievably late. I got out of the shower, slipped my sticky feet into flip-flops, and squeaked down the hall to my room. And then I just stood there for a long while, seriously considering skipping work and running back to bed to hide under the covers … would anyone notice if I didn’t show up today?
There were days when I wished my bank account would just fill itself up without any effort from me. Today was one of those days. My bagel got stuck in the toaster and burned to a crisp; I barely hit my glass on an angle against the kitchen sink, and it shattered into a million jagged gems; and the sole pair of clean socks that I could find were mismatched, and one of them had a hole that kept cutting off the circulation to my big toe.
I hadn’t slept a wink—not even a little bit. I could sleep through music blaring in the room next to mine. I could even sleep through a spontaneous game of dirty underwear football erupting on the other side of my curtain, but I couldn’t block out the sound of police sirens going off in the distant city night. Go figure.
I ran the four blocks to school. My kneecaps were still throbbing, and they were slowing me down—that was my excuse anyway.
You wouldn’t know it was a university if you drove past it. From the road, it looked more like a detention center, except without the barbwire and the guards. But, if you made it past the windowless walls, the grounds felt less like a prison; there were real trees, real green grass, and dirt beds with real flowers here. Sometimes you could even hear the birds sing over the honking traffic outside the compound.
I followed the cobblestone path up to the school library. All of the school’s buildings were in some way or another linked through underground tunnels or bridged passages; you never needed to leave, go out of the compound, unless you really wanted to. The library was still by far the biggest and nicest building, though I couldn’t understand why they would spend the most money on something they were trying to get rid of.
The campus was usually bustling with students and teachers and staff. Now it was more like a black hole had sucked out all signs of human life overnight. It would be a long, empty summer.
I tried to catch my breath before pushing through the library’s revolving doors. Inside, it was cool—air conditioning was a luxury. I went through the metal detectors and grabbed my backpack off the conveyer belt. A long counter flanked one side of the library’s main floor and rows of vacant computer stations and metal chairs of burgundy plastic-leather took up the rest of the space. But there were no books—and I was a conspirator to this tragedy. My job was to scan all the literary works of art, sections 341 to 471, fourth floor of the library archives. What happened to the books after that … the horror of the digital age was too much to bear. I was selling my soul for minimum wage.
The lady at the reserve counter looked at the big clock on the wall and peered at me over the rim of her glasses as I rushed to the elevators. My kind, the soul-sellers, weren’t exactly hailed in these parts. I hit the elevator button to go down while perspiration was building on my forehead.
There were five elevators that took students between the seven floors of the library, but only one went down to the basement archives. That one was slow and temperamental.
I knew that I should have gone back to bed when I saw Jeremy stroll through the revolving doors. I knew for sure that I should have gone back to bed when I saw him walking in with another girl. I had dated Jeremy for about a month at the beginning of the school year and for another two-week round of self-torture over the Christmas break. He had helped me get a job in the library; I needed all the help I could get—there was only so much creative writing I could bring to my resume without having to admit that I had never actually held a job in my life.
I pressed the stupid elevator button twice more—too late.
“Hi, Emily,” Jeremy said, flat-toned.
I pasted a smile on my face and spun around. “Hey, Jeremy, how are you?”
“Fine,” he quickly said, lancing his arm around the girl. She was everything I wasn’t: cute, blonde, big-breasted, and shorter than him.
“That’s good,” I said curtly.
I pressed the button once more and the doors opened at last. We got in the elevator and let the ding of the lighted floor numbers do the talking. Jeremy and the girl got off on the second floor. He had looked back once before the doors closed, his arm never leaving her shoulders.
Jeremy was about an inch shorter than me, and he was viciously competitive—Napoleon complex, I surmised. I had beaten him at poker once, and he had accused me of cheating—I gave him his two dollars back. When we broke up, he left with the same look of frustration that Skylar had had the night before, but no bumps on his head—that I knew of. At least I got to keep the job. But I would definitely have to remember to take the creepy, but vacant, archive stairs next time.
Luckily, I had the fourth floor all to myself, which was encouraging, but nothing new. Sometimes weeks would go by before someone other than me walked through the rows of the fourth-floor book stacks. Mathematics and obsolete statistics were not the most riveting of subjects. I spent my days alone, flipping through damp pages to the hum of the dingy lights that were encased in the thick cement walls.
I set my bag down on the butcher’s block of a table that looked like it could have been an antique, but had been scratched, engraved, and penned beyond repair. Apparently, Stacey H. was here, Jessica & Naomi were BFFs 4Eva, and someone wished K.P. a gruesome death.
I yawned one of those tear-inducing yawns and picked up where I had left off a few weeks ago, before exams had taken over my life. My workstation: a computer and an oversized scanner that took up half the table.
I grabbed the next book on the shelf, opened it to the first page, and placed it face down on the scanner. I typed the book’s title, author, and publication date in the computer and pressed the green scan button. The lime green light sped from one side of the scanner to the other, and my work day had officially started.
It was a boring and mindless job, scanning each book one page at a time; but all things considered, it was a pretty sweet gig for a student. Of the few students who had been hired, one per floor to do this same job, most spent their paid hours either napping on the bottom of an empty shelf or making out behind the book carts, which Jeremy was probably doing by now. There was no adult supervision of the almost adult students. The first week I had started working there, I got in trouble with the other students for scanning the books too quickly—apparently this not only made the rest of them look bad but meant that the electronic library project would get done faster, taking jobs away from poverty-stricken students. I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for that, so I slowed down and used my free time to study and catch up on my homework. Like I said, it was a sweet gig.
But with school being out, I didn’t have any homework to do, and it was way too quiet to sleep. I could have brought a book to read, but my eyes were stinging from sleeplessness. With nothing but my brain waves to distract me, I had to break the golden rule, and I started feverishly scanning books.
How do you know when you’re There, I contemplated between the 800 pages of Algorithms: an Annotated History. Do you just get up one morning, pour yourself a glass of juice without breaking it, come to take a bite of your nicely grilled bagel and … boom! There is right there, staring you in the face—that moment when you realize you have everything that you’ve worked for, waited for, and you finally find yourself utterly fulfilled. What happens after that? Do you go into the new world of “What Else Is There,” or do you finish your bagel and live happily ever after? My There was not what I thought it would be.
For some people—most people—their ultimate goal had a dollar sign attached to it. They’d work their whole lives to build their There money. Me, I was the oddball; the b
iggest secret that I had kept from everyone in my new life was the fact that I came from money, a lot of it. I came from a world of privilege and excess—of a house full of people who were paid to be nice to me, of being forced to go to stupid private schools where I had to wear the stupid uniforms and go to the stupid parties. Burt was in his sixties, Isabelle in her fifties, and they were still working on their There money.
I was embarrassed by the fact that my parents had money. This was only exacerbated when I listened to my roommates make fun of the kids with money, the ones that paid for parking spots, the ones that bought five-dollar coffees. Somehow I knew that normal people wouldn’t understand my decision to leave it all behind. Some days, like today, I even questioned it myself.
I could normally scan up to three books a day without getting into trouble. Today, I was on a roll and did over a weeks’ worth of work. Thankfully, it made the day fly by—I would have to figure out how to hide the evidence later.
When my paid workday ended, I rolled my cart filled with evidence to the furthest end of the room, behind the last bookshelf, and trudged home. Then I did what I should have done first thing that morning: I climbed under the covers and hid.
I tossed around my bed for over an hour. The house was infuriatingly quiet. Frustrated, I flung the covers off and dug some running clothes out of the dirty laundry basket. I threw on whatever passed the smell test and ran out of the house into the peopled world. It was another beautiful evening. The days were already getting longer and hotter. A summer sleeping in a windowless room without air conditioning would be … interesting.
I noticed the absence of my Walkman as soon as I reached the sidewalk but didn’t dwell on it too long. After being cooped up alone in the library basement all day, it was kind of nice to listen to the sounds of the city, of life. I made it to the cemetery in pretty good time and said a quiet hello to Bill as I passed his grave.
When I reached the clearing into the projects, I immediately noticed the boy sitting alone on top of the picnic table that was nearest to the cemetery. I recognized him by his gray hooded sweater, the same one he had been wearing the day before when his dog had mowed me down. But he wasn’t wearing his ball cap this time, and his face in the lowering sun was clearly visible.
When he saw me, he got up and quickly intercepted me at the walkway. He pulled the hood of his sweater off his head, tousling his brown hair in the process.
Yes, I could definitely see him now, and my already hot flushed cheeks were turning a new shade of red. He was a handsome boy—man—I couldn’t decide how old he was. Too old for me? His eyes were striking, almost black. I was immediately aware that I was sweaty and gross. I also remembered that there was a huge mustard stain on the bottom of my T-shirt.
“Hello,” he said, quietly, his hands in his pockets. He seemed to be a different person today.
I was still trying to catch my breath.
His eyes scanned the grounds and stopped at me. “It’s getting late. I was starting to think you weren’t going to come today.”
“My bruised knees were slowing me down,” I said—an automatic reaction, always preparing for battle, expecting rejection or repulsion. When his cheeks picked up a shade of rose, something he had said suddenly occurred to me. “You were … waiting for me?”
“Yes,” he slowly admitted. “Does this surprise you?”
“You were really mean to me yesterday,” I said. I couldn’t find anything better, less unintelligent, to say.
Worry inexplicably washed over his face, like this stranger’s words had impaired him somehow. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. What I did, said … It was totally uncalled for.”
“You didn’t hurt me, really. Your dog did, though.”
He glanced around us again. Then a careful smile crept on his face as his eyes made their way back to mine. “Meatball was sorry too.”
“Meatball?”
He paused, the smile vaporized. “Meatball is my dog’s name.”
His sudden change in demeanor had made me remember the beast whose massive jaw and teeth were sure signs that I could have easily become his late afternoon snack. I was scanning around us, expecting to be tackled at any moment.
“No worries, I didn’t bring him,” he told me, reading my mind.
I mustn’t have looked convinced.
“Really, he likes you,” he insisted.
“I don’t think he knows me well enough to make such a crucial split-second decision.” It was meant as a joke, but his eyes narrowed.
“Right,” he said. “Anyway, I wanted to make sure you were okay and apologize for yesterday.”
“I’m fine, and apology accepted.”
I tucked an errant hair behind my ear. The minute I touched my head I realized that most of the hair from my ponytail had fallen out in a sweaty mess. I immediately fingered my crazed hair back into a snug ponytail.
His lips twitched, like he was suppressing a smile. “Do I make you nervous?”
“No,” I swiftly answered, with a grimace. Of course it was a lie. He chuckled lightly and this time I glanced away from him. The projects were teeming with people again today, but no one seemed to notice that we even existed, or they were still avoiding us.
“So, do you live around here?” I asked, a veiled attempt at changing the subject.
“Not really,” he answered, his gaze wandering again.
Was that a yes or a no?
“I live a couple of blocks away from here,” I offered, leading by example—this was how normal people conversed.
His eyes shot back to my face. “You shouldn’t tell people where you live. What if I was some kind of psycho?”
The features of his face had instantly darkened, and a chill ran down my bare legs.
“Well, are you?” I asked, my voice slightly shaking.
“It’s a little late to be asking me that, isn’t it?” he snapped. His brown eyes searched my face. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but I pressed my lips together, just in case he found the spinach salad that I had for lunch still stuck in my teeth. He strained a smile. “You need to be more careful is all I’m trying to say.”
I shrugged coolly. “I can run pretty fast … and I’ve managed to keep myself out of trouble so far.”
“This isn’t a good place for you to test your courage. You shouldn’t be coming here. Find somewhere else to run,” he said, looking away.
“It’s a free country. I can go wherever I want to go, whether you like it or not,” I said, feeling something that had nothing to do with him brew inside me. “What gives you the right to tell me what to do?”
His face darkened again. We glared at each other for what seemed like an hour; in reality, it was more like five seconds—five really long seconds. A tension bubble seemed to have swallowed us.
I sucked a breath through my teeth. “It’s getting late,” I said, taking a step backward. “I better go.”
When I turned sideways to leave, his arm reached out to mine to stop me.
“Wait,” he half-shouted, “I forgot something.” He pulled his hand abruptly away. The warmth in my arm still tingled while he dug a small box out of his pocket and shoved it over to me, avoiding touching me again.
“To replace the one that I broke,” he explained.
I took it, almost dropping it in the process. I opened the clear plastic box and a rectangular silver plate fell out. It had a circle in the middle and a square screen on the top. “Umm …” I said awkwardly, “thanks.”
His eyes widened. “It plays music,” he said like I was mentally slow.
Of course I knew what it was—anyone with money to spare had one of these. Why would I need to know how to use one if I knew I would never actually be able to afford one?
I squinted, turning the music thingy in my hands. His laugh caught me off guard. I gazed up.
He grabbed the piece of metal from my hand—more softly than I had expected—and held it up for me to see. Pressing on the cir
cle, the square screen lit up. He moved his finger along the circle line and showed me where to click to find music lists.
“You didn’t have to do that. My Walkman was pretty worthless.”
“Yeah, it was,” he quickly agreed. “But this one is brand new and it actually fits in your pocket.” He looked a little smug as he said this. “I even downloaded Bob Marley on there for you.”
“How did you know I liked Bob Marley?” I asked, tilting my head.
He raised an eyebrow. “You gave me the broken tape, remember?” He brought his fist to his chest to remind me that I had punched the tape into him.
“Oh … right,” was all I could say again, my cheeks afire.
He gave me back the music rectangle. “I can get you new running sneakers too, if you want. Better than the ones you’re wearing.” He smiled, but then his eyes darted around us again.
I looked down at my feet. “What’s wrong with my sneakers?”
When I heard him mumble something, I glanced back up. His face had suddenly turned ashen and he was backing away from me. He had turned back into the menacing boy I had encountered the day before.
“I gotta go,” he said. Just like that, he turned around and left.
I stood in place confused for a second longer, took a few breaths. Then I proceeded to turn around too.
“Emily,” I heard him call out. My heart jumped and I looked back to find that he had stopped in his tracks a few yards away. “I meant what I said. Don’t come back here.”
“I meant what I said too,” was what I had wanted to counter with, but he had already disappeared and I was too taken aback that he had remembered my name—nothing but quick breaths came out of my mouth.
I stuffed his gift inside my pocket—it did fit in there nicely, I noticed a little resentfully—and turned back on my heels.
I finished my run, more befuddled than ever … and with the realization that I still had no idea what his name was. He was the strangest person I had met, so far.
When I got home, I made myself a peanut butter sandwich—the bread was stale, but at least it filled one of the holes in my stomach. I took chokingly huge bites while I cleaned the broken glass in the sink that I hadn’t had time to get to that morning. I found a pair of sweatpants that hadn’t seen the light of day since ninth grade, and I threw a box of laundry detergent on top of my dirty clothes, stuffed a roll of quarters in my pocket, lugged the overflowing basket down the stairs, and headed out the door.
Crow’s Row Page 3